Saturday, December 12, 2015

‘Will Russia Survive Until It Produces Its Own Medicines?’

Paul
Goble

Staunton, December 12 – Russia faces
a serious challenge in producing medicines domestically that it had been importing
until Moscow’s counter-sanctions effort, a challenge complicated by a weak
pharmaceutical industry, tensions between the state and academic researchers,
and overly long periods between the invention of a drug and its introduction.

All three of these problems were
discussed at a meeting this week of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where
speakers laid particular stress on the fact that in the US and EU, drugs are
marketed in five to six years after their invention while in Russia, the time
lag is twice as long, ten to twelve years.

And that long lead time, one that
both the Ministry of Health and the Academy of Sciences hope to shorten,
prompted the Regnum news agency to headline its report on the session “Will
Russia survive until the release of its own unique medications?” (regnum.ru/news/innovatio/2031538.html).

Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova told
the group that “all the tasks the government has set for itself,” including “improving
the demographic situation” depend on the development of domestically designed
and produced medications and medical equipment and on speeding up the introduction
of innovations after they are made.

Regnum observed that Skvortsova’s suggestion
that the government must cooperate with the Academy of Sciences in this effort
represents “a sharp contrast with the recent past when health ministers avoided
meetings with academics and cynically ignored the opinion of the scientific
community.”

But cooperation between the Academy
of Sciences and the Health Ministry will not be enough, Academician Aleksandr
Chuchalin said. What is needed is the development of a pharmaceutical market,
and creating that, he pointed out, is something that “the Academy cannot do
because that is not its responsibility.”

Instead, the government itself is
going to have to change its approach if it wants medicines to be developed
domestically and then quickly introduced, he continued.“The bureaucratic system prolongs the registration
of these medications for many years, from three to five” more than necessary.”

And Academician Aleksandr Aseyev
said this task is urgent. “The problem of pharmacological security is one of the
component parts of the security of the state, just as important as food security,
defense security and fighting terrorism.”Russia has lost a lot of time, he said, but he expressed the hope that “the
situation is not hopeless."